We want to do everything we can to help our customers get through this period of uncertainty. We recently ran a webinar discussing the do’s and don’ts of remote working, which was a hit given the current climate. In this post, we will dig deeper into your business by analysing its health.
Here are some of our recommendations for best practices around reporting on the current health of your business. You’ll learn how to run those reports, where to look for information and how to use this data to plan for a healthier future.
So, let’s take a look at some of the crucial reports that you can create in Streamtime.
Client Profitability Report
This report showcases all completed and archived jobs filtered by a client. Make sure that your filters are set so you aren’t looking at internal jobs. You can sort by ascending or descending profit margin to gauge your most & least profitable clients in the set period of time. By analysing this report you’ll gain insight into:
- Which clients make you ‘busy’ and which ones make you profitable.
- Which clients are worth investing in / picking up the phone and talking to.
- Which clients are worth putting effort into being proactive.
Expenses/ POs
This report shows all expenses used or POs generated in the current financial year to date and the profit that’s been made. Why not look at the expense margins when analysing this report, so that you can assess their profitability?
This report answers essential questions like:
- What expenses relate to tasks/skills you might be able to take in-house by upskilling?
- Is your markup consistent and profitable?
Item overruns
This report showcases all items/services that have gone over budget in this financial year (it’s important to not mix it up with the jobs over budget). It’s a good idea to group your view by an item rate, in order to analyse your services in detail.
This is a fantastic report to learn the following:
- Which items are costing more money than you planned?
- Which are the services that get constantly overrun? Are you under-quoting or not skilled enough?
This is also a great report to assess retainers: services like web-banners or EDMs that you do for a set price.
- Are they of value?
- Are there parts of the process that can be improved?
- Are you constantly being challenged by scope creep?
Live billable jobs
“Live billable jobs” is a must-have report in any business! This report showcases all billable jobs that your team is working on. It should give you a good idea of how your current jobs are tracking and their potential revenue, so that you can forecast your cashflow accurately.
Non-billable time
Another must-have report! Non-billable is a challenge in many creative studios and a bigger problem if you don’t track it. By running this report, you’re able to analyse non-billable time tracked in a certain period to see if any tasks can be eliminated for cost saving purposes.
Here’s why it’s so good:
- Understanding non-billable time means that you can begin to track and reduce your total non-billable time as a business
- It can help to explain overruns
- It links directly to client profitability – are there certain clients where you don’t recover as much revenue for your time as others?
Pipeline
It’s essential to know how much money might be coming into the business in the near future. Keep this report consistent and ensure it gets updated on a weekly basis.
Set up your labels to make the most of this report. For example, 20% for opportunity, 40% for in discussion, 60% for quote sent, 80% for awaiting feedback. For a more accurate forecast, filter out the jobs that are less than 60% probability.
At Streamtime we make pipeline management a piece of cake. So, if you’re looking for a refresher, check-out this webinar where we uncovered the process around pipeline management in Streamtime.
Hopefully, this is all you need to get you started on analysing your business and making better decisions for a stronger 2020.
We also ran a webinar on this exact topic with Andy Wright ( Streamtime’s MD) and Carol Mackay ( Design Business Council). Feel free to watch it in your own time in here.
Happy planning!
